Mystery quilt - Starburst

Ta da... my mystery quilt is finished!! And it has a name - starburst.  I love the zingy colours that I went with and love how it has turned out

 The mystery quilt along was started by Sheila back in April 2011: so its taken me a year from start to finish

Sheila introduced me to paper peicing through this quilt along, something I hadn't done before and discovered that I love doing it. My favourite block on here is the mariners compass (top left hand corner)

 I hand quilted this, stitching around the stars in variagated green or orange.  Its been hard going as I used an old duvet for the backing and on further inspection it was egyptian cotton (a charity shop purchase)

The hand quilting shows up really well on the back

And I also included my tippa canoe block that I did all wrong, which Sheila renamed 'capsized canoe'.  Luckily I only made one!

I will make a label for this quilt and sew it on the back.  This was also the first quilt that I spray basted and I will never use safety pins again!!

A great big thank you to Sheila for putting this together and getting us to try new things.

This also counts as my 2nd finish for Rhonda's FAL!

Scrappy weather

The weather here today has been grey, rainy and cold: miserable. (perfect sewing weather!) Jenny and I went out for lunch as Beccy has gone to Westfield with a school trip today (the trip is to Sadlers Wells this evening but they decided to add the shopping trip in as well)

So, once Jenny had taken herself off to work, I had the house to myself.  I made a couple more of these:

 I have loads of scraps so I can make loads more of these, they will make a fab quilt.

And I added a border to my Stained quilt

The blue is perfect and is a single sheet that I got from Asda for £5!! I have enough for the back as well - very pleased with that purchase. 
Tomorrow will be revision for both girls and if my head feels less fuzzy I will crack on with some of mine as well.  We have two/three weeks left at work, where we are working to tight deadlines and then hopefully it will quieten down for a while and I can really crack on: I only have two more exams to do.

scrappy

I am still hand quilting my mystery quilt, not long to go now.  I wanted to sew something today though so I started on these:

 The tutorial for these came from A Little Bit Biased

Hmm, may have to do something with that bottom row!!

 I didn't want to start anything huge as I have so many other things on the go, but this is great for using up scraps and the blocks don't take long.  I have cut some others out and will run them up tomorrow

I also did a block for Bee Blessed over at Judes.  I havn;t done any since the wonky stars, and knew I had to rectify that! This is another great scrap buster and I will get a blue one made this weekend too

 Just in time for the long weekend, I am full of cold and feeling rubbish.  I think all the long hours are catching up on me - so the only answer is to keep sewing!
Hope you're all enjoying your weekends

a quick catch up

Oh I am so sick of this weather!  The only upside is that a) my garden is looking lush and b) its a good excuse to stay inside and sew.

I havn't really been doing anything major, just little bits of things:

I have made some more of these, but have kind of come to a halt as I don't really have much of another colour to make any more: I want to go with red, so will put this to one side for now (and start buying red fabric!!)

I have been making a few more of my hexies (this is about half of them) and then playing around to see what I want to do with them: they look too much all sewn together, so I need to space them out, but still not sure where I am going with this project!

I got a fab book from the library the other day, 'Simply Stars, quilts that sparkle' that has some amazing quilt patterns with stars-a lot of them are paper pieced. I wondered if I could hand sew them as well, so decided to do a test run with some scraps.  Not sure what this will be made in to when done, or whether I really could do a whole quilt like this, but it is fun to do in the evenings when I'm watching telly

 And I am still hand quilting my mystery quilt - I really love this quilt. 

 I have gone around or through most of the stars now - with the exception of the big red and yellow one in the bottom right corner (not sure how to do that one)

 I am using a variagated perle cotton, which I really like, and just doing different things for different stars.  I am sewing yellow stars on the green border too, but not matter how I tried, I just couldn't get a good photo of that.

So, the rain is helping with my quilting too: I am plodding away slowly on different projects!

Two nations

You may remember that I posted about my name tag that I made for my secret partner for the London FQ retreat.......  this was my sneak preview

well my partner has now received her package - it went to the lovely Leanne at She Can Quilt.  Thankfully she is pleased with it! 

Leanne is coming over from Canada, so I really wanted to do something to reflect the 'two nations'.  I had an idea in my head, but wasn't sure how to translate it, until I saw the material (see the pouch above)  Cutting out the maple leaf for the canadian flag took a couple of attempts, but I got there in the end

I used the red white and blue perle for the embroidery (which by the way, is put to shame when you see what Lucy did on my name badge!!)

I was so thrilled to get Leanne as a partner as she made for me in the Christmas table runner swap and got me spot on.  I have been so lucky with my two partners in this swap: Lucy who made for me and Leanne who I made for - can't wait to meet them both in person!



Hello - my name is ....

My name tag has arrived today!!  Anybody remember seeing this during the week....

over at the amazing Lucys   charm about you (her pic was much better than this one).  Picture the scene: I had done some of my revision this morning and Beccy and I were now at the kitchen table tackling some algebra equations: both of us were losing the will to live and then Jenny dropped an envelope of the table: this could be my badge I thought.  I waited until we had gone over the last algebra question(thankfully we were near the end anyway and I showed great restraint) and then this



Look at the lovely bird sellotape!



 when opened I revealed this lovliness

 with a lovely hand written note on the back of this postcard 

 I am in awe of this amazing embroidery, and love the needle and thread

and look at the even smaller embroidery for my blog name

 And some gorgeous scraps too

 I do need to apologise to Lucy for having such a long name and then such a long blog name: I bet her hear sank when she saw my name on her email! 

Now that I have my name badge I am even more excited - it makes everything seem that much more real, and there are so many people I can't wait to meet: and to give Lucy a great big hug for making me something so fantabulous

Nothing of mine

I have nothing of my own to show today, having just finished a 12 hour day at work :-(
(large glass of wine is calling me)
So I thought I would share what Beccy made for her 'bestie', for her birthday a few weeks ago

 she did a fabulous job, with very little help from me:  I only helped out with sewing the seams together at the end

Once I had shown her how to blanket stitch, she just got right on with it.  She saved herself a fortune too - I have seen similar cushions going for about £12!!